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Wasn’t I saying something not all that long ago about having been sort of half-planning without thinking about it, because thinking about it would make me sad, to slip unofficially out of bell ringing? It’s not like I’m good at it or, even if I practised eight hours a day every day as if I were in training for the Olympics or Norma for the Metropolitan Opera, would I get good at it.* Nobody is going to miss me beyond method bell ringing’s chronic shortage of hands on ropes.**

Okay. That was then. Now has gone rogue and bolted in another direction. I seem to have rung some kind of frelling bells five days out of the last eight. If you wanted to be cruel you could say I’ve rung bells nine days out of the last twelve. I wonder if heroin addicts feel like this after they’ve been clean for a while? The old buzz? That fluttering feeling*** behind the eyes† or in the base of the throat?†† The sense of being helplessly ensnared by a grinning, many-clawed obsession. Going har har har har har GOTCHA. Look on the bright side. I don’t have to worry about finding a reliable source of clean needles.

I can’t even (entirely) blame Niall†††. I went to South Desuetude entirely on my own recognisance. Sonar Fweep was my idea.‡ And I’m sure Old Eden was good for my character as well as my muscular redevelopment, tonight‡‡, after tinkling carelessly on the little light well-mannered bells at Crabbiton for . . . ahem . . . several weeks in a row now. Ringing at Old Eden is ploughing rough tussocky ground. Ah yes, plain bearings. Joy. Creak.‡‡‡

I’M NOT RINGING ANY BELLS TOMORROW. OR WEDNESDAY. Er. I think I will maintain a tactful silence about Thursday. And Friday. And I forget if I’m ringing on Saturday. . . .

* * *

* Any more than singing eight hours a day would make me a Norma. Sigh. At the moment I would probably settle for NOT being late for my voice lesson every frinkblasted week. I was supposed to predict that everyone on my end of Main Street was going to be getting their bathrooms replaced today and there would be epic numbers of OPULENT PERSONAL CARE SPACE REFIT lorries casually half-parked on the margins on BOTH sides of the road so unless you were a very thin bicycle you COULDN’T GET THROUGH?

I am also finally beginning to realise that I have a new(ish) tactical problem. I think I told you^ that as this horrible winter started dragging itself toward spring I let Aloysius^^ put me back on the singing rota at St Margaret’s. This means that on my service-singing weeks I’ll have spent the last two or three days of that week frantically cramming for service singing, since that week’s music director won’t have sent out the playlist till Thursday if we’re lucky. As it happens I was down to sing this week—that is last night—which was a special service and there were going to be LOTS OF PEOPLE THERE^^^ so I was a tiny bit more anxious than usual that I should have SOME clue about the stuff^^^^ we were performing.

This means however that by late Sunday night, when, even on a non-special-service singing Sunday, I’m exhausted and my mind is full of the detritus that results from classical training coming in explosive contact with Jesus Is My Boyfriend, and I’m trying to reengage with the former the results can be a bit bizarre. Even aberrant. And my voice lesson is on MONDAY. I was singing Panis Angelicus^^^^^ better on Wednesday than I was today. Sigh.

^ ?? One of the things about blogging every day was that I probably had told you things and therefore didn’t have to try to remember if I had. Remembering comes under the ‘Norma’ and ‘bell ringing’ category of personal excellence, ie Not Going to Happen.

^^ Aloysius is LEAVING. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. . . . Okay, pulling myself together now. I know this happens with curates and I even knew it was due to happen to Aloysius soon but . . . WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. I may be a grown up as a human being+ but I’m a baby as a Christian and Aloysius has been First Contact++ about a lot of stuff.+++

+ And a grown-up twice Aloysius’ age, as I may have mentioned before because it haunts me.~ At least I’m only seven years older than Alfrick.

~ I told him not long ago that it was hard sometimes learning stuff from children.#He took this in good part. I’m trying not to believe that he took this in good part because he’s a priest, and priests are obliged to take cranky remarks from elderly parishioners kindly and tolerantly. It’s in the small print in the Priest Contract: Be nice to the grouches God has blessed you with. You can afford to be nice because you’re a priest and you know God will sort them out later.##

# I suspect it’s even worse for those of us who were precocious in our own youth. Don’t be precocious. It will just make you crankier later on.

## ::ducks::

++ You can’t have a father figure half your age, right?

+++ My monks, for example, speaking of Alfrick. I could still be going ‘oooooh . . . monks . . . . scary’ and driving hastily past the monks’ gate, which has a large sign by the turn-in that says WELCOME, if it weren’t for Aloysius.

^^^ MAJOR EEEK. Till it occurred to me, hey, the more of them there are the less likely any of them can hear me. +

+ Also we had a drummer last night. Our usual drummer is actually a good drummer which might be considered regrettable in our usual raggedy-andy line up.But any drummer will be wildly over-miked so the rest of us can pretty much do anything we like and no one will know. Maybe I should try singing Bellini.

^^^^ Sic. I am still not a fan of Modern Christian Worship Music.

^^^^^ Corny? Sure. The good kind of corny.

** Or on short leather straps if you happen to ring handbells. I don’t know anyone who rings methods on handbells, do you? Especially no one who rings frelling quarter peals on frelling handbells. Which I may have done for a second time recently. On one of those nine days out of twelve. But then I don’t know me. I don’t want to know me. Crazy obsessed people make me nervous.

*** Which is not about getting your out-of-practise hands tangled in a bell rope.

† No, that’s your brain going NOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

†† Which is a matching AAAAAAAAAAAUGH trying to get out.

††† I may try.

‡ It was one of Wild Robert’s erratic seminars. And I needed Niall to drive that far. There was a motorway involved.

‡‡ Fortunately in terms of mental integrity it was mostly plain hunt for beginners. Nadia just about killed me today.^ In the nicest possible way of course. But Monday is not usually my best evening for an optimum bell ringing experience. And story-in-progress tonight? After, furthermore, last night’s heroic service sing? Not a hope. Might as well write another blog post.

. . . NO NO NO NO I CAN’T POSSIBLY START WITH THAT FIRST LINE, SOMETHING MIGHT BE LISTENING. . . . ::DANCES THE FANDANGO IN A DISTRACTING MANNER::* . . . It’s been a pretty crappy almost everything lately, you can hardly blame me for being paranoid. So, what I was risking saying was, I’ve had two surprisingly okay, engaged, useful, whatever, voice lessons in a row . . . just in time however for a three-week holiday break during which I will doubtless go to flat, unrhythmic little splinters again. So the powers of entropy don’t have to be paying attention. The gremlins can just lie back and giggle. Throw the occasional brickbat if they feel inspired. Although I may dare to hope for metaphorical brickbats.**

My attitude = not great.

I managed to whomp the whatsit out of myself with a not-very-metaphorical brickbat just before last week’s voice lesson and I mean whomp. The gremlins would have been proud of me. You may recall that this is A New Computer.*** I was rummaging a fortnight ago, in the scary dark interstices of the EVERYTHING folder, where files you haven’t seen since before you had a computer may lurk undetected for centuries, or at least till they make the next gazillion storage media redundant.† And, lo and behold, I unearthed a couple of the recordings I’d made of voice lessons YEARS ago, or at least I hope it was years. And I made the very nearly fatal mistake of listening to one of them.††

DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN I KNEW I WAS BAD BUT I HAD NO IDEA I WAS THAT BAD.††† I also remember that when I played them back at the time I was a little discouraged‡—also I had some other great emotional drama playing out in my life at the time and I’m learning that this always has a Florence-Foster-Jenkins-izing‡‡ effect on my singing—but I don’t think I wanted to find a bridge to jump off of. I should have wanted to find a bridge to jump off of, or at least to stop singing forever and let Nadia fill my slot with someone she can teach to SING. AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

About the only thing to say for this utterly demoralising experience is that I didn’t consider giving up singing forever. It’s too late. I sing for sanity.‡‡‡ But I pretty much went in for my lesson on my hands and knees last week and Nadia, bless her, said I FORBID YOU TO LISTEN TO THAT RECORDING. EITHER BURY IT IN THE BACK GARDEN OR—RECOMMENDED—DELETE IT. YOU’RE JUST HURTING YOURSELF LISTENING TO IT NOW. . . . The real point being she did NOT say, actually, I’ve been meaning to discuss giving your slot to someone I can teach to sing. . . . She did say that I’ve improved. WELL I COULD HARDLY HAVE GOT WORSE.

I came out of this at last week’s lesson like a bull terrier going for her supper Kong and SANG.§ It may not have been pretty but it was energetic. And this is the time of year when you can probably even sing (audibly) on the street without people thinking you’re the Crazy Singing Lady§§ and I’m having my annual frenzy of learning all the rest of the verses to my top favourite 1,000,000 Christmas carols§§§—which I admit is cutting into proper practise time but it does mean I’m singing.#

And . . . (re)learning Christmas carols## this year, I came to In the Bleak Midwinter and . . . hmmm. It hadn’t really registered with me till I moved over here, but it’s (perhaps) Peter’s favourite and has become one of mine. But this year, singing it, I thought, this isn’t a carol, this is a song that happens to be about Christmas. So I’m going to learn it properly—I took it in to Nadia today—and sing it all year. And become the Crazy Singing Lady who sings carols in midsummer. If I’m going to become the Florence Foster Jenkins of the 21st century I might as well do it with some flourish and swagger.

* * *

* And me dancing the fandango would be very distracting.^ Not in a good way.

^ Eh. You need a partner for the fandango. ::Eyes the hellmob+:: Hellhounds get that ‘oh help and glory she’s not going to shove FOOD at us again is she??? But we just ate last week’ look on their faces, delicately rearrange themselves to face the wall and appear to be deeply preoccupied with going to sleep. Hellterror throws herself up on her hind legs and starts demonstrating her idea of a fandango, shouting, ME, COACH! PUT ME IN! I CAN FANDANGO! ALL I NEED IS A CARMEN MIRANDA HAT!

+ Or hellhorde, as some enterprising forum poster suggested.

** You probably think gremlins are metaphorical. NOT IN MY LIFE.

*** The old one is still in a box under Raphael’s desk because he’s going to find time to resuscitate it any minute.^ You know, like maybe March. 2016. Not that I feel that I’m not getting my contract support hours out of him however: it’s a good day when I have texted/emailed/screamed-so-they-could-hear-me-in-Dorset him about the ultrabook’s^^ latest little ways fewer than 4,612 times.

^ Yes, since you ask. There’s still stuff on it that I’m missing.+ And you’re totally up to date with your back ups, your files are flawlessly labelled and you’re all ready for Christmas, right? GO. AWAY.

+ Besides the remnants of my sanity. Sanity, computers and I are really not an integrated whole. We’re kind of this universe, the anti-universe, and a third thing nobody’s discovered yet but it makes an even bigger bang.

^^ I’ve already complained to you about how you can’t say LAPTOP any more? That’s just so turn of the century. No, it’s ULTRABOOKS now. Ewww. I thought ‘laptops’ was naff, but ultrabooks has that Marketing Genius pong about it. Go away.+ Go shed your fuzzy, asthma-inducing fashionability on someone else’s carpets. I just want a computer that will fit in my knapsack.

+ I probably shouldn’t be repeating ‘Go away’ so often three days before Christmas, right? . . . GO AWAY.~

~ I know. You saw that coming. Sorry. It’s been a hard year.

† So, how about all those cassette tapes and floppy discs?

†† Well, I had a row of knitting to finish. And then about a skein and a half of rows after that.

††† May I grovel in apology here to the two or three people I’ve taken along to my voice lessons. In my pathetic defense I took them because I wanted them to meet Nadia and see/hear how totally cool and interesting and exact and responsive she is, and the way she can adjust what she says to what the student can take on.^ It’s true that part of the experience is that they have to hear me sing, but . . . well, I knew I wasn’t good, but . . . GROVELS EXTENSIVELY. I’LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN. NEVER EVER. I PROMISE.

^ I get a lot of horse riding metaphors.

‡ I also remember I blogged about it, but I don’t want to go back and read what I said.

‡‡ One of the things I might have found interesting if I hadn’t been having a nervous breakdown is what Nadia has been telling me for years about what she tactfully calls my ‘tuning’ issues which is to say that I spend most of my time going flat, not because I have no ear^ but from nerves. No no I can’t possibly do that whatever it is! FLAT!!!! And she’s right. It’s the exposed notes that go flat; it’s got pretty much nothing to do with pitch. I’ll go flat on a frelling C if it’s the top note of the bar; in the next bar I’ll sing an F on pitch if there’s a G above it I can go flat on instead. Why don’t I stick to knitting?^^

^ I haven’t got much ear but I generally recognise flat when I hear it. Except when I’m deaf from the throbbing in both ears.

^^ Because I’m also a lousy knitter? Sigh. Although until my life placids out a little I’m not even interested in doing anything more exciting than stocking or garter stitch with maybe the odd bit of ribbing for variety. I knit for tranquillity+. But then I sing for sanity.++

+ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

++ Um. Yes. And I’d be even less tranquil without my error-liable knitting. SIGH.

‡‡‡ Yes. As previous footnote. Also, for some inexplicable reason, my church likes my singing. They are even more desperate and/or tone deaf than I realised.

§ Any of you know Brother James’ Air? It is so pretty.

§§ Which they think the rest of the year. Crazy Singing Lady with a Variety of Dogs.

§§§ Every year they come back a little quicker. How long have I been taking voice lessons, and singing increasingly shamelessly on the street?^ By the time I die of extreme old age I’ll probably be quavering my way through all sixteen verses of everything at Christmas.

^ It’s done me serious good the last few months, I think, despite what the neighbours think, because of the adjusting-to-new-sitting-room-with-new-acoustics thing which was a much bigger issue than I’d expected. Silly me. Of course it was going to be an issue. In a little tiny sitting room I can—and do—make the blasted lamps rattle, because I have so little frelling control. I’m either loud or shut down to a faint creak. Sigh.

I’ve fallen into the habit of spending some of Monday evening with Penelope and yarn.** I usually try and feed the frelling-frelling argling-bargling hellhounds—and the perfect, adorable, food friendly hellterror—before I leave. One of the things that sometimes works with the [muttermuttermutter] hellhounds is that if you get them STARTED and they think, oh, right, food, it’s not sooo bad . . . they will keep eating. So I’m always on the lookout for dog-treat type things that might tempt them and are free of all the things they can’t have SIIIIGH. There’s a relatively recent line of tinned dog food that costs more than fresh frelling caviar*** that they will sometimes open one eye and look at thoughtfully. And there’s a new flavour of it that I gave them a big chunk of the other day which they ate with what passes in their case for alacrity and enthusiasm.† So today I chopped more of it up in smallish globs and shoved it into their proper food . . . put the bowls down and turned my back on them since they don’t like being watched . . . but there were terrific gobbling noises proceeding from the hellhound corner and I was weak and permitted myself to be hopeful. . . . Nah. Chaos had merely done his Prehensile Tongue thing which I’ve noticed before makes a remarkable amount of noise, and precision-instrument extracted every small globule of Consecrated Canine Comestible Flavour of the Month, leaving an interestingly pock-marked bowl like an artist’s rendition of the surface of the moon in . . . dog food. Darkness had decided that this operation was too much like work, and having opened the one eye and looked thoughtfully at his bowl, closed the eye again without moving.

Sigh.

But the day has been not without its small sheepish victories. I’ve previously referred to the fact that my singing lessons have not been going splendidly since we started up again after summer break . . . there have been goodish lessons and there have been I’M RUNNING AWAY AND JOINING THE CIRCUS lessons of traumatising disaster, but while I haven’t quite got to the point of thinking I should start investigating another outlet for my frustrated musical non-talent†† I have occasionally wondered if I should be thinking about it. Meanwhile I keep missing church because I’m too blasted tired to get in Wolfgang again and drive—yo, God, why did you plop someone with ME down a forty-minute commute from the church she’s happy in? I’m sure I’m supposed to be learning something from this tedious piece of reality but, um, I’m too tired—which means I’ve also been missing service singing. I was signed up to sing this Sunday—yesterday—and I’ve been in unusually-bad-even-for-recently voice the last fortnight BUT I WANTED TO SING and . . . I think I’ve said this before, the awful Jesus Is My Boyfriend stuff does give me a certain amount of freedom from worrying about Mozart or Handel getting special permission to come back and haunt me, and I can just sing, and offer it as part of my service to the church. I like to think that God hears it the way it’s supposed to sound, like Handel or Mozart sung by Marilyn Horne or Renee Fleming.

I started out last night sounding like a bowl of rice krispies. If you’re into breakfast cereal that crackling noise is fine in the morning as Morse code for EAT ME but not so much later on in the day with a microphone in your hand. But something happened: God, or team spirit††† or alien mind probe or whatever but . . . I started singing. Indeed I was making so much noise I decided to dispense with the microphone.‡

And I went in to Nadia today and sang How Beautiful Are the Feet, which is the horse that threw me violently something like two months ago and that I have been afraid to go near.‡‡ And I didn’t sound like Marilyn Horne or Renee Fleming‡‡‡ but it was recognisable.§ So I’m putting off running away and joining the circus for at least another week.

* * *

* NOOOOOOOO IT’S DECEMBER NOOOOOOOOOOOO

** Penelope used to knit . . . and stopped forsome unfathomable reason. I’ve been spending even more than my usual amount of time lately hanging from the chandelier^ and screaming ^^ and have therefore had even greater than usual need to knit as a coping mechanism^^^ and Penelope has got re-interested by relentless exposure.# We even went to one of my favourite yarn shops the other week so she could squodge what she was buying. But the best part was that WE TOOK NIALL WITH US. SO HE COULD DO THE DRIVING. Hee hee hee hee hee hee. Hey, he’s retired. He doesn’t have anything better to do, does he?## I don’t think he’s going to learn to knit however. He looked kind of stunned in the yarn shop. Of course I wasn’t paying that much attention because I was on my knees digging through the sale bins.

^ Although I no longer need a chandelier. Excess of . . . um, excess . . . has caused me to grow little super-glue pads on the ends of my fingers and toes so I can stick to the ceiling like a very large gecko. THIS MAKES TYPING AND WALKING ON THE FLOOR VERY INTERESTING. It’s also hard on the finger joints. Which I need limber and flexible for knitting.

^^ Those of you who know me off line will be aware that I have reason, and that most of the reason(s) don’t get on the blog.+ I am hoping this is merely a phase and what I used to think of as a life will return. Meanwhile . . . thank God for knitting. Even if at this rate—as I was telling some friend or other recently—I may never get past garter-stitch scarves and ditto pullover jumpers, the square kind where the body is two big rectangles and the sleeves are two littler skinnier rectangles and you leave a gap in the sewing-up for your head to poke through. HEY. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE YARN. I’ve been saying this for, um, is it getting to be three years now? It’s all about the yarn. Cables? Pfffft. Lace? Are you frelling joking? On a good day with a following wind I can manage simple increases and decreases. SIMPLE ONES. ON A GOOD DAY. But I buy nice yarn.

+ It is now MONDAY night and my new computer gear HAS STILL NOT ARRIVED.

# She is remarkably calm in the face of a ranting madwoman waving pointy sticks in her face. She raised four children. Nothing flaps her.

## Remodelling the kitchen. It will look really flash when he finishes. That’s when.

††† I know about having one’s little ways and so on^ but sometimes my own blinding ridiculousness amazes me. Last night the one other singer asked me where I wanted to stand. In the back, I said. She looked at me pityingly. There is no back, she said. There are only four of us.^^ I know, I said, but we can stand farther back on the stage.

And this does it for me. I have no idea why. We’re still face to face with the frelling congregation—there is nothing between us and them—but we stand about a foot farther back than—last night—the keyboardist and the guitarist. I can look at the back of someone’s head if I want to.^^^

^ !!!!!!

^^ Guitar, keyboard, us. Plus a bass player and a drummer who somehow or other get not to be on the stage with the rest of us.

^^^ Although since the leader is usually on guitar, you kind of want to be able to see his face to pick up your cues more easily. And yes, so far as I’m aware, all our guitarists are blokes. Any female Christian guitarists with a high tolerance for fatally maudlin Christian worship music moving to the south of England, I know a church that needs you.

‡ In kindness to the assembled. The more my life is kicking me in the head the flatter I sing. Nadia says this is dead common but . . . I don’t want to be expelled from St Margaret’s, or even the band.

I’m just back from church. Hurrah. I haven’t been in yonks and yonks. I’ve thought for the last three Sundays—I think it’s three—that I would make it this week and then I have one of my unscheduled collapses and don’t.* I felt deeply guilty** a fortnight ago when my name was on the [singing] rota again and Aloysius could have really used some support—St Margaret’s, like most of the rest of the northern hemisphere where people live, gets thin on the ground in August while they’re all on holiday in someone else’s home town.*** So if that shocking failure was a fortnight ago, my name would coming up on the rota again . . . yes. Hmm. Buck was leading. And there was no one else on the list.

. . . Pav, go lie down.†

I looked the music rota up on Thursday and blanched. Also I’d had no song list so I could look the stuff up on YouTube and complain. But possibly I had had no song list because I had been a no show for so long they’d drummed me off the rolls. Which in August when there is an insufficiency of people on stage to hide behind is maybe quite a good thing.

Friday. Still no song list. I began the day feeling pretty good in brain and energy terms, so I emailed Buck. WHERE IS MY SONG LIST [I might come, you never know]?

. . . And then Saturday I had another frelling lying-down day†† ARRRRRRGH . . .

Pav, go lie down.†††

So I got cautiously out of bed today wondering what was going to happen. One of the things that happened was that I FINALLY had a return email from Buck saying he’d only just got back from holiday to 1,000,000,000 emails and sure, come along tonight and we’ll party.

Um.

So I went early like a good girl and found him practising ALL BY HIMSELF. Where would you like to be? he said, brandishing a music stand. In the middle? On the other side of the stage? BEHIND YOU, I said clearly. And you have to sing what I’m supposed to sing. No messing around with the tune.‡ He gave me his Steady Look, which is never a good sign. But we gambolled through the music, some of which I knew and some of which I did not know. One of the ones I did not know has a long embarrassing spell of Woah woah woah where you just sort of emote with your mouth open, torturing innocent variations of the so-called tune in whatever manner seems good to you. Ad lib. You know. Eh. Gah. Buck can do that one.

I didn’t know how much voice I was going to have, because I’ve been too feeble lately to do much singing beyond folk songs while hurtling, but since for some reason they refused to turn my microphone off tonight you could certainly hear me.

As it happened it wasn’t as dire as all that. One of the blokes who plays a keyboard was unwise enough to turn up for the evening service and Buck nailed him. So in fact we started a few minutes late while Jethro frantically dragged his keyboard out of the cupboard and started plugging things in with his hands going so fast he looked like an octopus with fingers. Which may explain why, when we got to the woah woah woah and Buck shot off into parts unknown I not only shot after him but soared past—he’s a nice strong tenor with some top end but I’m a soprano. I win.‡‡

And having been winding up cables that hate me since I first started this singing shtick, tonight I had a lesson from the ex-roadie and ex-member-of-the-band Buck in how to wind up a cable so it doesn’t hate you. Who knew this was a skill?

Pav, GO LIE DOWN.

Yeah. I think I’ll do that too. Preferably in a bed however. With lots of pillows and books. Pav will probably prefer a chew toy.

* * *

* I haven’t been to the monks in forever either. Siiiiiiigh. If you have ME, don’t join a church frelling MILES from where you live or fall in love with a bunch of monks who are even farther away. I thought I was finally going to make it to the abbey last Saturday . . . and got an email from Alfrick saying, don’t come if you were planning to, there’s a doodah^ on and night prayer is cancelled. And then Sunday, possibly from disappointment, I had another lying-down-in-a-daze day, and didn’t make it to church again.

^ This is of course the deep theological usage of the term ‘doodah’.

** Which does not improve the lying-down-in-a-daze experience

*** And the evening service is the little one. Apparently the earlier services still teem pretty well, even in August.

† Poor Pav’s training has gone totally pear-shaped the last two months or so what with Everything Else Going On and I swore that as soon as things even BEGAN to settle down I’d start doing something more with her again.^ And fabulously amusing as rolling over on command is, the thing that would make a significant difference to both her quality of life and mine is if she would learn to GO LIE DOWN on command, so I have a better alternative when she’s winding herself up to start bouncing off the ceiling than to lock her up in her crate again. Even bribing her with foooooood gets a little oppressive after a while and I need her to like her crate because she inevitably spends a good deal of time in it. And I don’t want to make a huge deal of it when she’s just being a bull terrier and put her in her harness and make her Long Down at my feet. ‘Go lie down’ is just another off button like Southdowner-trained Olivia’s holding is.^^

^ Her walking more or less at heel and sitting and looking up at me when I stop is getting not at all bad except, of course, when I start to think so. But people who know bullies tend to fall down laughing when they see us doing our somewhat erratic trick+. I’m usually smiling even without onlookers++. The little evil eyes do enhance the experience of being stared up at—and the way a bullie’s back legs are built how bullies sit down often provokes hilarity even in the clueless onlooker.

+ Ie successfully.

++ No NOT in surprise. You rude person.

++ Holding still works fine, by the way. If she gets too turbo-charged about another dog—and with her personality I am not going to risk her being ruined by too many encounters with stupid people’s off lead ugly citizens the way my poor sweet hellhounds have been ruined—I don’t just pick her up I hold her.

†† Possibly due to the extreme frustrations of Friday, which included, after learning of the third mortgage I was going to have to take out to pay for the new boiler, belting into Mauncester at the last possible minute to pick up our NEW CLEAR GLASS SPLASHBACK^ for the gas hob/stovetop at Third House which Ignatius had already promised to screw in on Saturday . . . AND THEY FRELLING MUFFED THE JOB. And are going to have to do it all over again. On their penny, but even so. Arrrrrrgh.

And then I rang handbells with Niall for the first time in months and it TOTALLY wiped me out. No measurable trace of brain function after. I used to be able to ring handbells without having to be rolled home in a wheelbarrow. . . .

^ Ordering same having taken somewhat longer than it might have when I arrived last Friday at 3:55 to find that despite the stated hour of closure as 4:30 the only person still there was locking up as fast as he could turn the key.

Finding someone who could provide a clear glass splashback has been a whole other saga as fashion presently dictates that the only splashbacks any cool up to the minute person would want are brutally glossy things in really harsh grisly in your face colours or the even more in your face polished steel uggggggh. I get enough of the dentist’s office/torturer’s look at my dentist’s office/torturer’s tea parties, okay? AND I WANT TO SEE MY TILES. They’re nice tiles and they cost a lot of money.

††† If you stirred Pav and me together you’d get . . . one very extraordinary looking creature who lay down precisely the right amount in precisely the right circumstances.

‡ Aloysius perfectly well can sing harmony, and often does. Buck, however, is dangerous. He gets carried away.

‡‡ I had two people tell me after how lovely my singing harmony was.^ They’re so nice at St Margaret’s. And they so really need singers they are eager to be encouraging.

It was going to be a really bad day.** The ME is using me as a punching-bag again*** and I got out of bed in stages, saying, it is Monday, and I am going to my voice lesson. I am going to my voice lesson.All I have to do is crawl to the car, unlock the door, and put the key in the little hole. Wolfgang knows the way.

It has been a really bad week for—not for singing, see previous about singing for sanity, but for attentive practise, so that I don’t feel a total fool going to sing for Nadia.† After my voice slammed shut on me last Monday—which was actually rather alarming—I gave it two days off anything but folk songs and Leonard Cohen†† . . . and then I had stomach flu and all those deep breaths and gut-disturbing diaphragm action for singing seemed like a pretty bad idea, although I could (maybe) stop worrying about the slamming shut, which was probably germ related. †††

I did sing over the weekend—a little—and I noticed at church last night that I was making a noise.‡ But this morning, warming up, I felt like I’d Never Seen Any of This Music Before in My Life‡‡ and did not set out for my lesson in a very positive frame of mind.‡‡‡

But fate and body parts are often perverse little creatures. I don’t even know how to explain what happened; if I try it’ll sound like gibberish to non-singers and will probably make those of you who would understand what I was talking about if I could explain it properly fall down laughing. The point is I made what Nadia herself called a Technical Leap Forward having to do with waking up the ‘mask’ sinuses and persuading all the various bits and pieces—tongue and soft palate in particular—to clear out of the way and let the sound resonate.Gleep. And she took me up to the high B-flat I need for both Batti, Batti§ and I Want to Be a Prima Donna—I didn’t know it, of course, although I knew we were getting up there—and which I do erratically have at home when I’m focussed on not paying attention and shutting myself down because I Can’t Possibly Do That, so I know the frelling thing exists. And as she pointed out, grinning, I sang it with no strain and no muscle tension. It’s the lack of tension that was so astonishing—she said, yes, your support has come a little adrift, but we can fix that.§§ You’ve made real progress today.

And . . . golly . . . you know . . . I may yet make a singer.

* * *

* Although everything is relative. See next footnote.

** It’s been a bad hellhound day for weeks. With the very, very occasional exception, Darkness more often than Chaos, neither of them is eating. The only reason they haven’t starved themselves to death by now is because I keep force feeding them. They haven’t eaten a scrap of anything today, voluntarily, for example. This is utterly demoralising for me even when the ME isn’t bad. It’s not the taste of the drug; they get three meals and only two of them are dosed. If they are having a unique nauseous reaction to this stuff—nausea which lasts through the third meal—that would explain it, but I doubt it’s that simple, and neither the vet nor I can ask them how they feel or why they’ve decided food is the enemy.^ Meanwhile although their output is improved it’s still far from . . . um . . . a neat pick-up so we persevere. Wearily.

^ Although if it were that simple, anorexia in humans would be less scary and less difficult to treat. I remind myself of this sometimes, on my knees beside the dog bed, stuffing cold sticky food down recoiling hellhounds.

*** I did survive^ my first official Samaritan duty shift, thank you for asking. It was a relatively quiet night which given that I was not at my best is probably just as well,^^ although I need some demanding shifts to get through the list of things your mentor has to support you through before you’re turned loose to function mentor-less. I did write a few texts^^^—and I hope you eventually get over that initial shock of, oh, you poor thing, let me give you a cup of tea and a biscuit.#

The next fortnight is going to be a little unnecessarily exciting however since I’m still at the tremulous beginning of learning Sam weekly duty-shift stamina and I’ve got Street Pastor shifts two weeks in a row too. This is from the swap with Eleanor—she took my Friday night before a Saturday-morning Sam training in June and I’m taking her Saturday in July while she’s touring great swathes of America with her husband. Meanwhile the ME needs to clear off.

^ . . . I’m here. I’m writing a blog entry. This is not the new Zombie McKinley. Breath on the mirror and everything.

^^ And I’m going to assume that hang-ups are not in response to my American accent.

^^^ My mentor, whom we will call Pythia, has a very good line: if you had written what this person has written, is this the response you’d want to read? —Since ‘I have a magic wand and I’m about to make it all go away’ is ineligible, like the cup of tea, if for different reasons.

# Tricky, of course, since they could be texting you from anywhere. New Guinea. Mars.+

+ A CUP OF TEA AND A BISCUIT?? I’M SO BRITISH.~

~ I have no idea what the cup-of-tea-and-a-biscuit equivalent is in either New Guinea or Mars.

† Although I continue to be tempted to take . . . probably Matty Groves in to Nadia. Some folk song with drama. I told you, didn’t I, that I asked her how you sing a maddened nobleman who is about to off both his wife and her lover when you’re a soprano? And she said it’s all in how you release the consonants. And. Glory. Yes.^

I may not have told you since I don’t remember admitting that I’m not a big Sandy Denny fan^^. I know. Heresy. I am, indeed, so lost to all finer feelings that I wonder if the Sandy Denny cult might be somewhat based on the fact that she died young. Nice enough voice but . . . eh. Give me Maddy Prior or June Tabor or Norma Waterson. The Matty Groves take that makes my blood beat hard and my hair stand on end is Fairport Convention after Sandy Denny, with the blokes singing. And they can roar, which is not an option available to a soprano.

But I think I’m still not quite up to eating the scenery for Nadia. Maybe a few more weeks. Months. Years. . . .

^ ‘ . . . And I shall Strike the very nextblow, and I will Kill you if I Can.’

^^ But when the ME is this bad I don’t have any memory either.

†† Famous on twenty-three continents^ for having a vocal range of two and a half notes, and tends to write songs accordingly.

^ This includes Mars

††† Your Body Is Your Instrument. Why didn’t I stick with the piano?

‡ I mean . . . singing. Melodic. More or less. Probably. I wasn’t in the band this week so it didn’t matter.

‡‡ Mozart? And he was—?

‡‡‡ Although the presence of non-eating hellhounds in the back seat, looking forward to their Monday afternoon post-lesson walk somewhere interesting, probably was not helping. They like me wrecked by ME: I’m much more willing to noodle along while they investigate every clump of grass for the recent presence of other dogs and/or fascinating pieces of litter.

§ Oh—that Mozart

§§ She also said that if I can’t do this free resonating thing at home this week—don’t panic. But that I should only sing new music—stuff I’m working on for the first time now—if I break out Che Faro, for example, which is absolutely my longing and desire, I’ll just revert to old habits. Wait a little now, she said. We’ll go back to Che Faro later, I promise.